By Tom Cowie
The owners of the Hill of Content bookshop are optimistic they will remain at their famous 100-year-old location in Melbourne’s CBD after the building sold to an offshore investor.
The three-storey property at 86 Bourke Street changed hands for $5.3 million, commercial real estate agent JLL said. The new buyer plans to continue leasing it out as a shop.
The property that houses the Hill of Content has been sold.Credit: Aaron Francis
There were concerns when the property was advertised for sale that a new owner could seek new retail or hospitality tenants, or occupy it themselves.
The building had been owned by the same family for 73 years and has been home to the Hill of Content, which is on a month-to-month lease, since 1922.
The property was passed in at auction last month on a vendor bid of $5.7 million, and the possible ouster of the Hill of Content prompted an outcry among Melbourne book lovers.
Nick Peden, JLL Melbourne’s director of capital markets, said the new buyer was a passive investor who intended to hold the property long-term as a family asset.
“They just want it leased and they want it to produce an income,” he said.
“There’s every chance that [Hill of Content] will remain. They’ve been a really, really good tenant for a really long time, so there’s no reason why that wouldn’t continue.”
Hill of Content owner and manager Diana Johnston said the business would have continued in another location if forced to move, but she was confident it would now be able to stay.
She said she was relieved to learn who the new owner was after several months of speculation. Staff, some of whom have worked there for decades, were in tears when they found out.
Diana Johnston, Hill of Content bookstore owner and manager.
“Certainly, we think that’s probably about the best outcome we could have hoped for,” she said. “We’ve just got to wait for the sale to go through and then hopefully negotiate a lease with them.”
Hill of Content opened more than a century ago, when founder Albert Henry Spencer lived with his family behind the store.
Spencer came up with the name for the store during a walk in Fitzroy Gardens when “the elm trees and the plane trees and the poplars said, ‘Call it the Hill of Content.’”
Johnston said it would have been difficult to recreate the shop in a different location, although several options had been looked at.
“The shop and the books are all one thing, really; it gives the iconic feel and history of the place,” she said.
The outpouring of support from readers and writers wanting the Hill of Content to remain at the location had been overwhelming.
“People just came out of the woodwork. We’ve had groups seeing if they could afford to get the money together to buy the property,” Johnston said.
“Others were offering to do whatever they could do, to lobby around and try and find another retail shop for us. Just generally, people coming in with goodwill and cakes and all that sort of thing.
“It really makes you realise that you do live in a community.”
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